![]() But on top of that, Singh had previously founded a smart calendar app called Tempo AI which he sold to Salesforce for an undisclosed sum in 2015. For starters, there is the fact that Pulse had been focused exclusively on Slack status updates. To the casual observer, Slack was probably the obvious contender to acquire Pulse. Singh also said in the email that there was a chance that the buyer could resurrect Pulse in some form, but there is little indication that Mozilla has such a plan on its radar. In an email distributed to customers at the time, the company attributed this to “market conditions,” noting that it was finding it difficult to raise fresh capital - but it did confirm that it had found a buyer, the identity of which was unknown until today. While Pulse did have plans to expand beyond Slack into other workplace communication tools including, Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace, the company abruptly announced in late October that it was shutting down. “But there’s hundreds of signals, and the thing we realised was status is not just ‘availability,’ it’s actually a way to communicate empathy.” “A lot of people actually want to update their status, but it’s tedious,” Singh told TechCrunch in October. This is particularly important with remote work becoming the norm, and Pulse was looking to find its niche at a time when workplace culture is rapidly changing. Pulse was all about communicating things to colleagues around the world passively, regardless of what tools they were using or what timezone they’re in. While he acknowledged that companies such as Microsoft or Google might well want to develop a similar automated status update tool for their own products, they were less incentivised to make it work well as an integrated feature that plays ball with various third-party tools. ![]() When quizzed on whether Pulse was more like a feature that the big tech platforms could just build themselves, rather than a sustainable business in its own right, Singh was adamant that Pulse could thrive as a standalone product. ![]() Singh said at the time that it was planning to raise a seed round of funding early in the new year, something that obviously won’t be happening now. The company was among TechCrunch’s Battlefield 200 startups at TC Disrupt in October, and TechCrunch interviewed Pulse co-founder and CEO Raj Singh at the event for a potential future startup profile piece. Pulse had flown largely under the radar since it started rolling out to a small group of users last December, but the company had apparently garnered some fairly big-name customers, including Netflix and 1Password, with monthly premium plans starting at around $3 per user. If their schedule for a particular time says “hair appointment” from 12-1 pm, then the person’s Slack status update might display a scissors emoji alongside the word “haircut.” Or, it might say “birthday” alongside a cake emoji if that’s what is in their calendar. Pulse, essentially, was an automated status-updating tool that used signals based on pre-configured integrations and preferences set by the user.įor example, users could synchronize Pulse with their calendar and Slack, setting rules to stipulate what their status and corresponding emoji should be based on keywords in their calendar event title. “As we look to continue to improve user experiences across all of our products, ML will be a core part of that.” Feel the pulseįounded out of Menlo Park in 2019, Pulse in its initial guise was a “virtual office” platform called Loop Team, but after honing the idea for a couple of years it pivoted and rebranded last November. “We’re acquiring Pulse for the incredible team they have built,” Mozilla chief product officer Steve Teixeira told TechCrunch. Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but the deal is tantamount to an “acqui-hire,” with Mozilla looking to deploy the Pulse team across an array of machine learning (ML) projects. ![]() Firefox developer Mozilla is making a rare foray into the world of mergers and acquisitions, with news that it has snapped up recently shuttered California-based productivity startup Pulse. ![]()
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